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Twenty-First Century Psychoanalysis

If psychoanalysis will survive in the twenty-first century, this book’s wager is that it will be Lacanian psychoanalysis. Today, the survival of psychoanalysis is in question. Even Jacques Lacan himself, at the peak of his influence when psychoanalysis was a dominant discourse, did not believe that psychoanalysis would triumph and merely posed questions about the survival of psychoanalysis, when future subjects would want something else.

This book articulates a possible future for Lacan and psychoanalysis, through an exploration of the historical trajectory of psychoanalysis and a survey of the ways Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a unique response to the pressing clinical demands of our time.

Much of the book stages this through explications of specific ways Lacanian concepts have developed as a reading of the clinical - as well as the broader psychic and social - phenomena of our moment in history. Psychosis, which is an increasing clinical phenomena, and addiction, which is often described as a contemporary epidemic, are given longer treatment here, while other chapters address central concepts such as trauma, fantasy, the symptom, the body, transference, knowledge, and love.

The book closes with two sections of reflections on psychoanalysis outside of the Lacanian orientation and on the general mental health field.